It’s in open alpha and you can sign up for their mailing list at joindiaspora.com
These guys have a lot of publicity. It remains to be seen how well they will do as a Facebook alternative/replacement. It is not impossible, as Facebook was able to wrest the social media crown from MySpace. But the former is now more entrenched than MySpace was and Diaspora must offer something unique to users that will make the user switching cost (described in my previous post) worth absorbing.
Diaspora’s current user value proposition is privacy and ownership. This is a poke (pun not intended) at Facebook which has a bad reputation (deserved or undeserved) in those areas.
The question is whether users care about that. I suspect that they do, but not enough to switch.
Diaspora and other Facebook alternatives out there (Appleseed, OneSocialWeb, Elgg) have to offer a better social experience in order to gain share from Facebook.
An example is the Facebook status/news feed. This feature was launched a few years after Facebook started. Before that, Facebook had a MySpace-like landing page. As a Facebook user, I find that the feed holds the key value of Facebook: it gives the impression that the user is engaged with friends.
Diaspora needs to identify a similar key feature. When that happens, the trick is to hold on to that as a Diaspora-exclusive experience. That is also not easy as Facebook now has the size and resources to quickly duplicate anything that an upstart can come up with.
Hopefully, I’ll get my Diaspora invitation soon and will be able to try it out and “share” my impressions.